Has anyone here seen a sorting facility for any of the carriers? To pack a gun and send it through one of these places is plain nonsense. They ride on conveyor belts that are often times 8 to 10 feet off the ground. Packages regularly fall off these belts to the floor, only to be picked up and reloaded again, SOMETIME. There are MILES of these belts in these huge sorting facilities. Worst part is, at the end of the line, there is large catch baskets. The conveyor belt does not angle down to slide the packages in, oh no...they stay at the same elevation and the packages free fall 8 to 10 feet into the bin.
So imagine if your gun is one of the first in the bin that day, then EVERY other package will fall right on top of yours and the weight just keeps climbing until the bin is full and they empty it. No thank you, UPS, Fed Ex, USPS Priority, etc...ALL do this route.
Only one that doesn't do this is USPS Registered Mail. This process is completly different. Once you drop off your item of Registered Mail, it MUST be taken to the secure room in that post office. Only ONE person at that facility has the key to the room and or vault. It will be placed in there for safe keeping until it's time to be loaded on a truck. The truck will pull up, all the other mail is THROWN in the truck to get it full, once that is done, the qualified person with the secure room key then retrieves your package from that room and hand carries it to the truck where it is placed in the rear and once in, a LOCK is placed on the truck and the truck driver then has to sign a form stating he has taken custody of that piece of mail.
Once that truck arrives at the next facility, which may well be a large sorting facility, the qualified person on duty at the time will come out with the key to open the truck and once open, will sign for your package and then HAND CARRY the item to the secure room, where it's locked up again until the next truck goes out for it. This process is repeated over and over again, with every change of possesion, a signature is required to relinquish the item and also take control of the item. This package will never see a conveyor belt, it's always hand carried by someone who has signed their name to it while it's in their care.
No matter what any one says, this method is the safest yet slowest method of mailing any package that you need to be kept safe.
I have a family member who is a PostMaster and he told me the above story. He also pointed out that it is all too common for trucks to be loaded in a fashion where the normal mail bags and boxes are loaded and to get "more in" the loaders will stand on the previously loaded mail to continue the stack higher.
The part about falling from the conveyor belt is why carriers state the package must be packed in such a mannor to be undamaged when exposed to a fall of 8 feet. They have that in their writing (I may not have the wording exact) for a reason, and that is because it happens EVERY DAY.
The tracking is a joke, but if you have a good PostMaster, he can access the database and find your package as it is signed and accounted for AT EVERY stop. They do not update their site to show this so you cannot track it, but they can if they want to.
Lastly, as many have said before, it's the cheapest method to ship to with insurance. Try and insure a gun with Fed Ex or UPS for 25K...would love to see that bill. That same insurance on a piece of Registered mail will cost you $38.75 plus postage. Only way cheaper is to have a writer on your collector insurance like the big gun dealers have. They do not worry too much about the guns and they usually use UPS since they have their own insurance and UPS is quicker.
Hang in there, Registered Mail is the way to go...if there is a problem, it will be found or someone will go to jail and you will get your money back in the amount you declared it for.
